Richard Carmona's television campaign ads paint a rugged portrait of the Democratic Senate candidate: a decorated Green Beret, a trauma surgeon, a SWAT team leader and a U.S. surgeon general who battled "political interference" from higher-ups in President George W. Bush's administration.

We live in an age of memoir, when people hunger for authentic stories about identity and redemption. But Lemon Andersen, the street poet who went from Rikers Island to Broadway, was reluctant at first to tell his own story.